Update 1.184.5

Summary

Hello engineers! We’ve heard your feedback for the last few minor updates, and since so many of you are missing the weekly update videos, we’ve decided to post some new, different content! This week we have the first video in a series we’re calling Catchin’ Clang. In this series, everyone’s favorite developer, Rexxar, will give you a behind the scenes look at the process of finding and fixing bugs in Space Engineers!

Additionally, Rexxar will start providing a sort of mini dev blog on minor updates talking about one or two features or fixes in the update.

We hope you will enjoy this new style of update post, please let us know what you think!

An important note for modders and ingame scripters! We’re planning some large changes to the APIs, and we need your help! If you have any issues with the API, or any feature requests, please post in these forum threads!

Some of these changes will break the API, but we will give you more information about these changes as soon as we can, so you can get your mods ready to go before the update comes out. Stay tuned!

Dev Blog:

One of the issues I worked on this week was a mysterious crash that happened when downloading mods. We received a few reports of this through our crash log reporter, and since I have been working on the mod download code recently, the ticket was put on my desk.

I looked into the section of code reported by the crash log, and couldn’t find anything that would produce the error. So I looked closer at the log, and noticed a ton of errors indicating that the user somehow lost connection to Steam at exactly the wrong time, which was resulting in some sort of corrupted state causing invalid data to be fed into the code.

I eventually managed to reproduce the problem by disconnecting my ethernet cable at exactly the right moment :D I found some unsafe code and rewrote it to not crash if given invalid input. The code is also now slightly faster as a result, so loading mods should take a little less time.